Any Room Left?

Well, after the tiny, tiny, tiny little drop we saw in the market last week, it seems everyone – – even EWI, if you can believe that – – is saying that's the only drop we're going to get for now, and we'll just start heading up again during the last week of March. The biggest "reason" for this is window-dressing (so I guess we can expect AAPL at, what, $700/share by Friday?)

There's a little more room to run higher, sure, but at some point this market is going to have to deal with true exhaustion that lasts more than a single trading session. Let me start off with a few charts that are plausibly sorta-kinda bullish. Maybe.

Crude oil, whose front month is shown below, still has a nicely-formed inverted H&S pattern, and as long as it stays above that horizontal line I've drawn, it's pretty solid. This is probably the most bullish chart on my radar.

Another reason to think maybe the bulls will continue to lord it over us all is that the last time the ascending trendline of the $INDU was broken, the market simply shrugged it off and moved higher still. The first step of that might have taken place again on Friday.

And, most impressively, there is a decent amount of room left on the S&P 100 before it bumps against its major resistance line – – maybe about 5% or so upside.

Looking at the S&P 500, the measured move to about 1425 wasn't quite achieved; the high last week was 10 points shy of that amount. So it's very, very close, but we could still eke out a little more upside.

The Apple-powered comet called the NASDAQ likely has a little bit of potential upside. I don't have a single solitary long position – – unless you want to call the 50% of my portfolio sitting safely in cash to be a "long" – – because to me that downside potential outweighs the modest upside potential.

One way of seeing how portions of the market are genuinely beginning to roll over is by looking at a trio of moving averages for our old friend GDX. This isn't a healthy-looking chart.

Oh, and one last bit, mainly for amusement – – there was a lot of chatter Thursday and Friday about the poor TVIX, which lost well over half its value in just a couple of trading sessions. The chart below shows TVIX in blue and the VIX – – – ostensibly, the indicator on which it is based! – – in black. It's pretty easy to see how much "fat" was in the TVIX that got sucked out, lipo-style. Not a pretty sight, particularly if you were unfortunately enough to actually own any of it.

I know there's some juicy content coming from other contributors this weekend, which I always appreciate. Have a good break, everyone.